AMD’s x86 Microprocessor Market Share Continues to Soar.

Advanced Micro Devices has set another record for itself in terms of x86 processors market share by supplying 23.3% of all chips thanks to increased shipments of AMD Turion 64-series of microprocessors for mobile computers. Intel Corp. has already gained market share, particularly in the server space. At the same time, market shares of companies like Transmeta Corp. and Via Technologies have tumbled.

In the third quarter of the year Intel’s market share increased to 76.1% from 73% in the prior quarter, whereas AMD commanded 23.3% of all x86 microprocessor shipments, up 1.3% from the prior quarter and the highest market share for Austin, Texas-based chipmaker ever, according to figures released by Mercury Research. Transmeta Corp. and Via Technologies only commanded 0.6% of the microprocessor market.

Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, was quoted by Cnet News.com as saying that Intel started to regain “market share in server processors while AMD’s notebook processor shipments surged”. In fact, words of Mr. McCarron were confirmed by AMD itself during the most recent conference call.

“We established a new record for total microprocessor shipments, up 18% sequentially and up 34% year over year, driven by increased server, mobile and desktop shipments. Further, customer adoption of AMD Turion 64 processors resulted in a greater than 50% sequential growth and 70% year-over-year growth in mobile dollar sales and units,” said Bob Rivet, chief financial officer of AMD.

In Q2 2006 AMD Opteron processors have grabbed 25.9% of server market, up from 22.1% in previous quarter. Shipments of the Opteron processors for 2-way servers grew 45% quarter-over-quarter, while AMD’s server microprocessor market share in terms of revenues was 33% of the total server market revenue. The mobile and server x86 microprocessor market shares for Q3 2006 were unavailable at press time, however, some checks with several server builders indicated that the impact of Intel Xeon 5100-series launch was not tangible for the market share of Intel Corp.

Despite of the fact that Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors have won many reviews and demonstrate higher performance compared to competing offerings from AMD, positions of both companies in the desktop market did not change significantly, as Intel did not start shipping its new chipsets with integrated graphics cores along with the Core 2-series processors, thus, the impact of the new chips on the mainstream market was not that significant, according to Mercury Research.

Intel's market shares increased by 3.1% whereas AMD's market share increased by a mere 1.3%, and after all that AMD still have less than a quarter of the market share. Yet, the title seems to highlight AMD's gain of a mere 1.3% (magnitude wise smaller than Intel’s gain of 3.1%, and also smaller than the market share lost by the smaller players which I reckon is around 4.4%) inappropriately calling 1.3% as "Soar"!

The issue here is that smaller chip maker are being squeeze out of the market; our choice is soon going to be limited to just those x86s offered by the two big players. The title missed this point altogether. Don't you own it to your reader to rephrase the title of your article so that it presents a more balanced perspective?

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You're an idiot. If AMD gains 1.3% percentage points over the 22% they had before, that's a gain of almost 6%. While Intel gained more in absolute numbers, relatively their improvement from 73% to 76.2% is only about 4% and thus smaller than AMD's gain.